Sometimes, clients just appear on your mental radar. They pop into your mind out of the blue, and you think, “Gee. I wonder what happened to so-and-so?” They might have been in active treatment, but have since dropped off, or recovered from a condition and haven’t been back since.

Whatever the reason, it happens, and we’ve often wondered if we should be doing something at those times. Recently, instead of just continuing to wonder, we decided to try an experiment.

We have a dry erase board in the staff room, and lately we asked the team to simply write down clients when they think of them out of the blue. Pretty simple stuff, really – just write their names on a board.

For a while we wondered about the best way to connect with them, though. Call? Write? Email? We’d been using personal letters to reengage old clients, but the truth was we wanted to connect with those people. After all, we really did want to know what was happening with them.

In the end, we decided to experiment with email. Tara wrote six personal emails to clients who had appeared on our “mental radars” in some way. The result was incredible: people loved it. All six responded quite quickly, and at least two have booked to come back in. Just like that. Minimal time investment, zero cost.

Why did it work so well? I think part of it was the medium – email’s less invasive, and more convenient for starting a dialogue. Letters aren’t great for instant dialogue, and it’s often hard to get people on the phone at a time that’s convenient for everyone. More important, though,  I think it was because these were in no way “salesy” emails. They were genuine inquiries: we were thinking of you and wondering how you were. The decision to reengage with the practice was entirely their idea.

The lesson? If someone’s on your mind, then maybe it’s time to be on theirs, too.

Update 2: The book’s here! You can find The Practitioner’s Journey here, and learn more here. Enjoy!

Update: The Practitioner’s Journey is off to the presses! We’re really excited about this book. It’s the end of a long stretch of writing and rewriting, but best of all, it’s going to change the way that many practitioners think about growing their practices. More details to follow as the book hits the shelves, of course, but in the meantime, we’ll be moving AHP to a new online home. With any luck, that’ll be a seamless process, but if things get dark and strange in here for a while, you’ll know why!

Related posts:

1. 5 Random Files: An Easy Way To Reactivate Clients
2. 3 Ways to Keep Chatty Clients on Time
3. The New Found: Who Gets the Oh-So-Close Clients?

Getting new clients takes time, energy and sometimes money. For all that investment, it’s a shame when they don’t come back. We’ve had a lot of faces through our practice doors over the years, and while we do our best to keep them engaged, we don’t retain everyone. As a result, we’ve got our share of “dead” files in the back room.

This year at our strategic planning day, one of our team members came up a great idea for reactivating some of those old patients. It only takes a few minutes a week, and although we’re just starting out, I think it’s a great plan.

5 Random Files: How it Works

After this idea came up,  Tara reminded me of a chiropractic marketing guru  – I’m pretty sure it was Dr. Demartini -  who talked about how his staff would pull a random client file every week at the office and just…well, just think about the client.

According to the story, more often than not that person would call out of the blue and return to the practice. Kind of a law-of-attraction approach.

Our process is a little different, but geared toward the same result of re-engaging past clients in our current practice. Here’s what we’re doing:

1. Each week we pull five old files at random from the archives. (If you don’t keep files, you could just as easily check old appointment records, invoices or other client notes.)
2. We quickly review the files to see if we have anything new to offer, or some reason that we may be able to help now, when we might not have in the past
3. Where applicable, we write a personal letter to the client, describing when and why we saw them last, and why we think we might be able to better serve them now.

That’s it! Just a few minutes down the memory lane of your practice past to see if there’s anyone you might be able to help.

Why It’ll Work For You

Here’s why this approach is likely to bring back some old faces to your practice:

• You’re better now than you were then. Since you last saw these clients, you’ve probably gotten better at what you do. You’re more experienced, more confident. You may have done some continuing education, or have some new treatment tools at your disposal. Or perhaps your pricing, service, staff, hours or other aspects of your practice are more appealing.
• It’s personal. Each client is getting a letter just about them, talking about why they visited in the past, and how you might be able to help now. It’s far more personal and relevant than a newsletter or bulk mailing, so your clients are more likely to respond.
• It’s cheap & simple. Really. This is a no-brainer. The first few letters take a few minutes to put together, but after that it starts to get faster and faster as you realize part of what you’re saying each time is similar. In total, it only takes about 20 minutes a week of time commitment, and a under $5 in stamps, paper and envelopes.

Why five files? It just seemed like a manageable number. Five was small enough to ensure the job gets done and retains its individual patient focus (of each five we pull, there are only 2-3 that get letters), but big enough to get through quite a few files in a year.  You can do just one, if that’s what works best for you.

I’ve got high hopes for this effort, and I love the personalization of it. It’s also really rewarding to see how much more we offer now than we did a few years ago. It’s easy to forget how much progress you make over time!

Related posts:

1. Top of Everyone's Mind: Reconnecting With Missing Clients
2. The New Found: Who Gets the Oh-So-Close Clients?
3. 3 Ways to Keep Chatty Clients on Time

There is a natural progression to starting an alternative health practice. After opening your doors, the first order of business is, of course, to get as many new patients as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, a natural second step in this process is to forget all about these patients once they leave the office. The file goes safely in the cabinet, and the next time it comes out is when the patient takes the initiative to call for an appointment.

Getting your holistic patients to return with regular frequency iswhere you start to reap the rewards of the hard work and expense of attracting new patients to your practice in the first place. It’s where you begin to turn your focus from the external world of prospective patients, to the internal world of the existing patients in your practice.

Why? First of all, new patients are expensive. It takes far more time and money to attract a new patient to your practice than it does to get an existing one to revisit. Secondly, from a health perspective, one visit is generally not enough to cure what ails – wellness takes time. And you want the success and close relationship that comes from multiple visits. It’s what encourages referrals.

Finally, without steady return visits, it’s very difficult to implement the other multipliers and take your practice to the next level. Building a successful business requires new patients, but it also requires them to return.

Return visits hinge on four factors, each of which is critical.

Your Business/Health Care Model

Your business model is the system by which you create, market and deliver your products to your target market. Does your model of alternative health care call for regular return visits, or is it focused on short-term care of acute issues? A chiropractor, for example, might focus on acute issues like back pain resulting from a car accident. The patient will come for regular chiropractice visits until the problem is solved. Another chiropractor, however, might operate differently, recommending regular chiropractic care on an ongoing basis for better health and prevention of illness.

This distinction can be made in almost any alternative health care practice, from naturopathy to TCM to body work.

Your Authority

Part of ensuring return visits to become comfortable as an authority in the patient-doctor relationship. This doesn’t mean becoming authoritarian, aloof, or condescending; it means recognizing that you are an authority in your area of expertise. You’ve studied it, practiced it, and presumably had some success.

How does this relate to return visits? Patients come back to see their naturopath, for example, because as the expert, the doctor tells them when to return. Don’t be afraid to tell your patient when you need to see them next. If your health care model calls for regular return visits, then explain the importance of that, and as an authority in your job, tell them when to come back.

Your Communication

Sadly, it’s easy for patients to forget you exist until something’s wrong. It’s important to find ways to stay “top of mind” with your patients, and remind them that wellness is a preventative job.

Don’t rely on your new patient marketing to do this job for you. Your exsiting CAM patients need a different message, and will appreciate the “exclusive” feeling that comes from personalized letters, email and newsletters delivered only to practice members.

Your Service Quality

In the end, you’re only as good as the quality of the products and services you provide. A great business model and communication strategy will only take you so far unless what you offer is of sufficient quality.

What defines a quality experience in an alternative health practice? Many consumers will equate quality with value. That is, they’ll compare the complete experience they’ve had in your practice against the dollar price they paid, and using an unknown formula unique to them, calculate the value. Was it worth it? Did they get more than they paid for? Less? This formula is unique to each patient, but rest assured, it exists.

No related posts.

SoundPractice.Net’s latest podcast is on the importance of creating and using systems to manage return visits, and ensuring that test reports, etc. are properly followed up on.

SoundPractice.Net – Podcasts for Medical Practice Management and Health Care Administration

Related posts:

1. A Six-Figure Income in 3.5 Days Per Week: Practice Wisdom from Kevin Doherty